Real news is that the biggest North American movie is getting still bigger and still setting records: Marvel’s The Avengers (playing very wide with 4,349 theaters). It looks like around $28M for today and approaches a gargantuan $100M second weekend. This will be far-and-away the highest second domestic weekend in box office history (passing Avatar‘s and The Dark Knight‘s $75M records). That means the holdover will drop only 53% after its record-setting opening. Coming into Friday it was scooping up 75% of all tickets sales at online MovieTickets.com. Disney says its superheroes worldwide juggernaut will cross $300M domestic on Saturday (unless there’s a big surge this evening) in a record of only 9 days. (The previous record was 10 days.) Through Sunday its domestic haul should be around $355M. So what’s the total overseas so far? Its international gross is $533.3M for a global cumulative of $888.3M. Disney thinks $1B is possible through Sunday.

The comedy thriller opened by making a so-so $550K during midnight screenings from 1,600 locations overnight. But the re-teaming of Johnny Depp and Tim Burton isn’t drawing blood at the box office by only creeping out of the gate with about $10.5M today for at best a $28M weekend – unless there’s a late-night turnaround. Pic suffered weeks of soft tracking, mostly because The Avengers sucked all the air out of other films. Even so Dark Shadows was predicted to earn a minimum of $35M — which is feeble considering the pic cost from $150M-$175M. But it should have opened to at least a $40M-$50M weekend with the popular Depp-Burton push that last sent Alice In Wonderland grosses soaring past $1B worldwide.

Other big news is that Fox Searchlight’s specialty film Best Exotic Marigold Hotel jumped into the #7 spot despite playing in only 178 venues. Overall, the weekend is looking like $164M or up +17% from last year.